The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  Lisa smiled. “You are.”

  “Thanks to science.” I glanced over at the dog. It was lying on the sand a short distance away. It seemed sullen and unsure in its new environment, torn away from the safety of the acid pits and tailings mountains of its homeland. Jaak sat beside the dog and played. Its ears twitched to the music. He was a good player. The mournful sound of the harmonica carried easily over the beach to where we lay.

  Lisa turned her head, trying to see the dog. “Roll me.”

  I did what she asked. Already, her limbs were regrowing. Small stumps, which would build into larger limbs. By morning, she would be whole, and ravenous. She studied the dog. “This is as close as I’ll ever get to it,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  “It’s vulnerable to everything. It can’t swim in the ocean. It can’t eat anything. We have to fly its food to it. We have to scrub its water. Dead end of an evolutionary chain. Without science, we’d be as vulnerable as it.” She looked up at me. “As vulnerable as I am now.” She grinned. “This is as close to death as I’ve ever been. At least, not in combat.”

  “Wild, isn’t it?”

  “For a day. I liked it better when I did it to you. I’m already starving.”

  I fed her a handful of oily sand and watched the dog, standing uncertainly on the beach, sniffing suspiciously at some rusting scrap iron that stuck out of the beach like a giant memory fin. It pawed up a chunk of red plastic rubbed shiny by the ocean and chewed on it briefly, before dropping it. It started licking around its mouth. I wondered if it had poisoned itself again.

  “It sure can make you think,” I muttered. I fed Lisa another handful of sand. “If someone came from the past, to meet us here and now, what do you think they’d say about us? Would they even call us human?”

  Lisa looked at me seriously. “No, they’d call us gods.”

  Jaak got up and wandered into the surf, standing knee-deep in the black smoldering waters. The dog, driven by some unknown instinct, followed him, gingerly picking its way across the sand and rubble.

  The dog got tangled in a cluster of wire our last day on the beach. Really ripped the hell out of it: slashes through its fur, broken legs, practically strangled. It had gnawed one of its own paws half off trying to get free. By the time we found it, it was a bloody mess of ragged fur and exposed meat.

  Lisa stared down at the dog. “Christ, Jaak, you were supposed to be watching it.”

  “I went swimming. You can’t keep an eye on the thing all the time.”

  “It’s going to take forever to fix this,” she fumed.

  “We should warm up the hunter,” I said. “It’ll be easier to work on it back home.” Lisa and I knelt down to start cutting the dog free. It whimpered and its tail wagged feebly as we started to work.

  Jaak was silent.

  Lisa slapped him on his leg. “Come on, Jaak, get down here. It’ll bleed out if you don’t hurry up. You know how fragile it is.”

  Jaak said, “I think we should eat it.”

  Lisa glanced up, surprised. “You do?”

  He shrugged. “Sure.”

  I looked up from where I was tearing away tangled wires from around the dog’s torso. “I thought you wanted it to be your pet. Like in the zoo.”

  Jaak shook his head. “Those food pellets are expensive. I’m spending half my salary on food and water filtration, and now this bullshit.” He waved his hand at the tangled dog. “You have to watch the sucker all the time. It’s not worth it.”

  “But still, it’s your friend. It shook hands with you.”

  Jaak laughed. “You’re my friend.” He looked down at the dog, his face wrinkled with thought. “It’s, it’s . . . an animal.”

  Even though we had all idly discussed what it would be like to eat the dog, it was a surprise to hear him so determined to kill it. “Maybe you should sleep on it,” I said. “We can get it back to the bunker, fix it up, and then you can decide when you aren’t so pissed off about it.”

  “No.” He pulled out his harmonica and played a few notes, a quick jazzy scale. He took the harmonica out of his mouth. “If you want to put up the money for his feed, I’ll keep it, I guess, but otherwise . . .” He shrugged.

  “I don’t think you should cook it.”

  “You don’t?” Lisa glanced at me. “We could roast it, right here, on the beach.”

  I looked down at the dog, a mass of panting, trusting animal. “I still don’t think we should do it.”

  Jaak looked at me seriously. “You want to pay for the feed?”

  I sighed. “I’m saving for the new Immersive Response.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve got things I want to buy too, you know.” He flexed his muscles, showing off his tattoos. “I mean, what the fuck good does it do?”

  “It makes you smile.”

  “Immersive Response makes you smile. And you don’t have to clean up after its crap. Come on, Chen. Admit it. You don’t want to take care of it either. It’s a pain in the ass.”

  We all looked at each other, then down at the dog.

  Lisa roasted the dog on a spit, over burning plastics and petroleum skimmed from the ocean. It tasted okay, but in the end it was hard to understand the big deal. I’ve eaten slagged centaur that tasted better.

  Afterward, we walked along the shoreline. Opalescent waves crashed and roared up the sand, leaving jewel slicks as they receded and the Sun sank red in the distance.

  Without the dog, we could really enjoy the beach. We didn’t have to worry about whether it was going to step in acid, or tangle in barbed wire half-buried in the sand, or eat something that would keep it up vomiting half the night.

  Still, I remember when the dog licked my face and hauled its shaggy bulk onto my bed, and I remember its warm breathing beside me, and sometimes, I miss it.

  THE CLAPPING HANDS OF GOD

  Michael F. Flynn

  Here’s a trip through a dimensional gateway to another universe altogether – but, as the intrepid travellers discover, no matter how far from home you go, some of the problems you encounter may be all too familiar . . .

  Born in Easton, Pennsylvania, Michael F. Flynn has a BA in math from La Salle College and an MS for work in topology from Marquette University, and he works as an industrial quality engineer and statistician. Since his first sale there in 1984, Flynn has become a mainstay of Analog, and one of their most frequent contributors. He has also made sales to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Weird Tales, New Destinies, Alternate Generals, and elsewhere, and is thought of as one of the best new “hard science” writers to enter the field in several decades. His books include In the Country of the Blind, Fallen Angels, a novel written in collaboration with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Firestar, Rogue Star, Lodestar, and Falling Star, and his stories have been collected in The Forest of Time and Other Stories and The Nanotech Chronicles. His most recent book is a new novel, The Wreck of the River of Stars. His stories have appeared in our Fifth and Twelfth Annual Collections. He now lives in Edison, New Jersey.

  TO A WORLD UNNAMED by humans, humans came. The gate swung open on a pleasant mountain glade, where the weather could be cool without being cold, and which lay cupped in a high valley below the tree line and far from the gray smudges of the cities on the plains below. This isolation was by happy chance and not by wise choice. Gates swung where God willed, and man could but submit. Once, one had opened in the midst of a grim fortress full of armed and hostile things and what befell the team that crossed no man knows, for the gatekeeper sealed it forever.

  Here, the humans erected a fine pavilion of gay cloth among mighty growths that might be called trees and colorful splays that might be called flowers, although they were neither trees nor flowers exactly. The motley of the fabric clashed with the surrounding vegetation. The colors were off. They aped the complexion of a different world and seemed here a little out of place. But that was acceptable. The humans were themselves a little out of place and
a bit of the familiar ought to surround them in the midst of all the strangeness.

  They decked the pavilion with bright cushions and divans and roped the sides up so the gentle and persistent eastern breeze could pass through. They stoked their larder with melons and dates and other toothsome delights and laid their carpets out for prayer. Though no one knew which direction served – the stars, when the night sky came, provided no clue – the gate itself would do for mihrab.

  The humans spent a night and a day acclimating themselves to the strange sun and testing the air and the water and the eccentric plants and such of the motiles as they could snare. They named these creatures after those they knew – rabbit, goat, swallow, cedar – and some of the names were fair. They stretched their twenty-four hours like taffy to fill up a slightly longer day. By the second night-fall they had shed their environmental suits and felt the wind and the sun on their skin and in their hair. It was good to breathe the world’s largesse, and many an outlandish aroma teased them.

  Exploring their valley, they found a great falls and spent another night and day at its foot, spellbound. A stream poured into the valley from high above, where the snows always fell and the snows always melted. It tumbled from the sky with a roar like the voice of God, throwing up a mist from which they named the mountain and within which a kaleidoscope of rainbows played. Its ageless assault had worn a pool unknowably deep in the rock below. Where and how the waters drained from the pool God withheld. There was not another like it in all the Known Worlds.

  Afterwards, they clustered in their pavilion and reviewed their plans and inspected their equipment, and assembled those items that required assembly. Then they told off one of their number to ward the gate they had passed through and settled themselves to study the strange folk on the wide plains below.

  Hassan Maklouf was their leader, a man who had walked on seventeen worlds and bore in consequence seventeen wounds. To ten of those worlds, he had followed another; to seven, others had followed him. From four, he had escaped with his life. With two, he had fallen in love. He came to the lip of the little bowl valley and from a gendarme of rock studied the plains through a pair of enhanced binoculars. Which are you, he asked the planet spread below him, assassin or lover? The answer, like the waters of the pool, remained hidden.

  “This is a fine place,” Bashir al-Jamal declared beside him, as broadly approving as if he himself had fashioned the glade. Bashir was Hassan’s cousin and this was his first outing. A young man, freshly graduated from the House of Gates, he bubbled with innocence and enthusiasm. Hassan had promised their grandfather that Bashir would come back. With a scar, the old man had said severely. The trek is not worth the going if one bears no scars back. But then, grandfather was Bedu and such folk had hard ways.

  “The water is pure; the air clean,” Bashir continued. “Never have I camped in a more beautiful place.”

  Hassan continued to scan the lowlands. “I have seen men killed by beautiful things.”

  “But the biochemistry here must be so different, none of the beasts would find us tasty.”

  Hassan lowered his binoculars and looked at his cousin. “Before or after they have taken a bite?”

  “Ah,” Bashir bowed to the older man’s advice. “You are the fountain of wisdom.”

  “I live still,” Hassan told him raising the binoculars again. “Call that wisdom, if you wish.”

  “At least, we may study this world unseen,” Bashir said. Deprived of one good fortune, he would seize another. “There is no evidence that the locals have ever been up here.”

  “Perhaps it is one of their holy places,” Hassan suggested, “and we have violated it. God has granted to each folk one place that is holy above all others.”

  Bashir was not impressed. “If He has this well may be it; but I think it is too remote.”

  Hassan grunted and lowered the binoculars. “I want a guard posted here and a sensor array, so that nothing may approach from this direction.”

  “Up a sheer cliff-face?”

  “Perhaps the worldlings have climbing pads on their hands and feet. Perhaps they have wings. Perhaps they have nothing more than cleverness and perseverance.” He capped his binoculars and returned them to their case. “I would fear that last more than all the others.”

  This is how they came to be there, in that enchanted glade upon the Misty Mountain.

  Behind this world lies a shadow world. It is called the Other ’Brane, and it lies not so very far away, save that it is in the wrong direction. It is behind us, beneath us, within us. It is as close as two hands clapping, and as far. Once before, they clapped, this ’brane and the other, and from the echoes and the ripples of that Big Clap, came matter and energy and galaxies and stars and planets and flowers and laughing children. Should they clap again, that will end it all, and many wise men fret their lives on the question of whether the two be approaching or no. But to know this they must learn to measure the wrong direction and that is a hard thing to do.

  Hassan thinks of the two ’branes as the Hands of God, for this would make literal one of the hidden Recitations of the Prophet, peace be upon him. But he sees no reason to worry over whether they are to clap or not, since all will be as God wills. What, after all, could be done? To where would one run? “The mountains are as fleeting as the clouds.” So reads the fiqh of the ’Ashari ’aqida, and the other schools have assented with greater or lesser joy.

  What can be done is to travel through the Other ’Brane. That skill, men have learned. The Other ’Brane is spanned like ours by three space-like dimensions and one time-like dimension; but it contains no planets, no vast spaces – only an endless, undulating plain, cut through by featureless chasms and buttes. Or maybe it is nothing of the sort, and the landscape is only an illusion that the mind has imposed on a vista incomprehensible to human senses.

  Crossing the Other ’Brane is a hard road, for the journey from gate beacon to gate beacon must be swift and without hesitation. There is an asymmetry, a breaking of parity, hidden somewhere in the depths of that time which was before Time itself. To linger is to perish. Some materials, some energy fields, last longer, but in the end they are alien things in an alien land, and the land will have them. What man would endure such peril, were not the prize the whole great universe itself? For the metric of space lies smaller on the Other ’Brane, and a few strides there leap light-years here at home.

  How many light years, no man knew. Hassan explained that to Bashir on the second night when, studying the alien sky, his cousin asked which star was the Earth’s, for no answer was likely. Was this planet even in a galaxy known from Earth? How many light years had their lumbering other-buses oversprung, and in which direction? And even if Earth’s sun lay in this planet’s sky, it would not be the sun they knew. Light speed does not bind the universe; but it binds man’s knowing of it, for in a peculiar way place is time, and all man’s wisdom and knowing is but a circle of candle light in an everspreading dark. No one may see farther or faster than the light by which one sees. Hence, one perceives only a time-bound sphere within a quasar halo. Now they had stepped into the sphere of another campfire, somewhere else in the endless desert of night.

  “The stars we see from Earth,” Hassan explained, “are the stars as they were when their light departed, and the deeper into the sky we peer, the deeper into the past we see. Here, we see the stars from a different place, and therefore at a different time.”

  “I don’t understand,” Bashir said. He had been taught the facts, and he had learned them well enough for the examinations, but he did not yet know them.

  “Imagine a star that is one million light-years from the Earth,” Hassan said, “and imagine that this world we are on lies half-way between the two. On Earth, they see the star as it was a million years ago. Here, we see it as it was a mere five hundred thousand years ago, as we might see a grown man after having once glimpsed the child. In the mean time, the star will have moved. Perhaps it will have changed color
or luminosity. So we do not see the same star, nor do we see it in the same place. Ah, cousin, each time we emerge from our gate heads, we find not only a different world, but a different universe.”

  Bashir shivered, although that may have been only the evening breeze. “It’s as if we are cut off and alone. I don’t like it.”

  Hassan smiled to himself. “No one asked that you do.” He turned toward the pavilion, where the others buzzed with discussion, but Bashir lingered a moment longer with face upturned to the sky. “I feel so alone,” he said softly, but not so softly that Hassan failed to hear.

  They studied the world in every way they could: the physics, the chemistry and biology, the society and technology. The presence of sentients – and sentients of considerable attainment – complicated the matter, for they must understand the folk first as they were and not as they would become; and that meant to see without being seen, for the act of knowing changes forever both knower and known. But to study even a small world was no small thing. A single flower is unfathomable.

  They sought the metes and bounds of the planet. What was its size? Its density? Where upon its face had the gate swung open? How far did it lie from its star? Soong marked the risings and the settings of sun and moons and stars and groped toward answers.

  They sampled the flora and the fauna in their mountain valley, scanned their viscera, and looked into the very architecture of their cells. Mizir discovered molecules that were like DNA, but not quite. They imagined phyla and classes upon the creatures, but did not dare guess at anything more precise.

  Ladawan and Yance launched small, stealthy birds, ultralight and sun powered, to watch and listen where men themselves could not. On their bellies these drones displayed a vision of the sky above, captured by microcameras on their backs, in that way achieving an operational sort of invisibility, and allowing the tele-pilots to hover and record unseen.